Interviews, first-person essays, and profiles about people in a
wide variety of fields which pertain to this special topic of
Quantum Computers.

OVERVIEW

Quantum computation, the use of quantum physics to perform operations
today's average computers cannot do, is a hot up-and-coming area of
interest for both practical and theoretical research. This month, Special
Topics examines the literature on quantum computers over the past decade
and over the past two years.

The
Bloch sphere is a
representation of a qubit, the fundamental
building block of quantum computers.

The initial data pool was constructed using the keywords
"quantum comput*" OR "quantum information*" OR
"quantum logic gate*" OR "quantum algorithm*" OR "qubit*" to search
titles, abstracts, and keywords of original articles, reviews, and
proceedings papers published between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2009.
To make the paper lists more on-target to the topic, the search term
"quantum comput*" was restricted to the title
only.

The list of top papers over the past two years contains many of the topics
covered on the 10-year list, but also includes cavity grids for scalable
quantum computation, accuracy threshold for postselected quantum
computation, light-matter qubits for a one-way quantum computer, quantum
computing with alkaline earth metal atoms, and holographic quantum
computers. Non-Abelian anyons and topological quantum computation and
quantum computing with trapped ions are reviewed.

Rankings: Once the database was in place, it was used to
generate list of authors, journals, institutions, and nations. Rankings for
author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways:
according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper*. The paper
thresholds and corresponding percentages used to determine scientist,
institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper,
and total papers respectively are as follows:

Entity

Authors

Institutions

Nations

Journals

Thresholds

12,269

2,661

81

634

Percentage:

%28

%135

%33

%5*

*Unless otherwise specified, all rankings have a
5 paper threshold for all measures.